The Betrayal Makes Me Smile

Led by Renee Ellmers, the House Republicans have yanked a bill that would prohibit the savage killing of 5 month old children, some of whom are gruesomely killed feeling their bodies torn limb from limb.

The Republicans did this on the day of the March for Life, when thousands upon thousands of pro-life voters marched on Washington. These are the base voters of the GOP who now see the party betraying them.

I have been writing about the GOP’s incompetence, contempt for their base, and lack of real pro-life bona fides for several years. It has been a recurring point I make and have made in the run up to the 2014 elections.

But it is often pro-lifers who have the hardest time believing it. Fiscal conservatives recognize it immediately. But pro-lifers see a politician kissing babies and talking Jesus and they extend plenary grace toward the politician. When the politician betrays them, they love them just the same. After all, they just couldn’t get the votes to get it done. But they really believe in the cause.

That, at least, is the pro-lifers’ rationalization.

In fact, today we are already seeing some pro-life groups making excusing for the House Leadership. These stooges love them some table scraps. But the majority of the pro-life movement will not be so easily mollified.

The GOP has been exposed, just after its election, as incompetent and having contempt for its base. Renee Ellmers has become the Abortion Barbie of the GOP — more successfully defending late term abortion than Wendy Davis ever hoped to do.

More and more of the Republican base sees the GOP Leadership today as I have long seen them. And that, friends, is a good thing.

Many observers have chalked up Republicans’ success in the midterms to their having kept the Tea Party in check. The establishment spent tens of millions beating back intraparty challenges, and not a single incumbent GOP senator lost a primary, for the first time since 2008. In his RedState posts, Erickson has argued against the idea that the Tea Party is on the ropes: “I do not expect to have to win every one of the races, but then the brilliance of this effort is that the establishment must win them all and we don’t have to.” Just as terrorists don’t have to blow up every bus to have the intended effect (my metaphor, not Erickson’s), conservatives don’t need to overthrow every incumbent in order to move the GOP’s agenda to the right.

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Erick Erickson

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